The Face of Death by Cody McFadyen

circumstances.
    “God, he was confident,” I say. “Not just in coming here on the weekend and in the daytime. He subdued two fit, healthy parents and two teenage children.”
    Dean’s eyes are wide and turning into the eyes of the dead, gray and filmy, like soap scum in a bathtub. Laurel’s eyes are closed. Both of them have their lips pulled back, reminding me of a snarling dog, or someone being forced to smile at gunpoint. Dean’s tongue protrudes, while Laurel’s teeth are clenched together.
    Forever now, I think. She’ll never pull her teeth apart.
    Something tells me that this carefully cared for woman would have hated that.
    “He would have used a weapon to intimidate them, and it wouldn’t have been just a knife,” I say. “Not threatening enough for so many victims. It would have been a gun. Something big and scary looking.”
    From the collarbone down, it’s as if they each swallowed a hand grenade.
    “A single long slice on each of them,” Barry says. “He used something sharp.”
    “Probably a scalpel,” I murmur. “Not clean, though. I see signs of hesitation in the wounds. Note the ragged spots?”
    “Yep.”
    He cut them open with a halting, trembling hand. Then he reached into them, grabbed hold of whatever he touched, and pulled, like a fisherman cleaning a fish. Standing over Mrs. Kingsley now, I’m able to make out the middle third of her spine; key organs aren’t there to block my view of it.
    “Hesitation cuts are odd,” I murmur.
    “Why?” Barry asks.
    “Because in every other way he was confident.” I lean forward for a closer look, examining the throats this time. “When he cut their throats, it was clean, no hesitation.” I stand up. “Maybe they weren’t hesitation marks. Maybe the cuts were uneven because he was excited. He might have come to orgasm slicing them open.”
    “Lovely,” Callie says.
    In contrast to Dean and Laurel, the boy—Michael—is untouched. He’s white from blood loss, but he was spared the indignity of being gutted.
    “Why’d he leave the boy alone?” Barry wonders.
    “He either wasn’t as important—or he was the most important one of all,” I say.
    Callie walks around the bed at a slow pace, examining the bodies. She casts looks around the floor, squints at the blood on the walls.
    “What do you see?” I ask.
    “The jugular veins of all three victims have been severed. Based on the color of the skin, they were bled dry. This was done prior to the disembowelment.”
    “How can you tell that?” Barry asks.
    “Not enough blood pooled in the abdominal cavities or visible on the exposed organs. Which is the general problem: Where’s the rest of the blood? I can account for place of death for one of the victims—the family room downstairs. What about the other two?” She gestures around the room. “The blood in here is primarily on the walls. There are some blotches on the carpet, but it’s not enough. The sheets and blankets from the bed are bloody, true, but the amount seems superficial.” She shakes her head. “No one had their throat cut in
this
room.”
    “I noticed the same thing earlier,” I say. “They were bled out somewhere else. Where?”
    A moment passes before we all gaze down the short hallway that leads from the master bedroom to the master bathroom. I move without speaking; Barry and Callie follow.
    Everything becomes clear as we enter.
    “Well,” Barry says, grim, “that explains it, all right.”
    The bathtub is a large one, made for lazing around in, built with languor in mind. It’s a little over one-quarter full of congealing blood.
    “He bled them out in the tub,” I murmur. I point to two large rusty blotches on the carpet. “Pulled them out when he was done and laid them there, next to each other.”
    My mind is moving, my perception of the connectedness of things picking up speed. I turn without speaking and walk back into the bedroom. I examine the wrists and ankles of Dean and Laurel